Hartley Coleridge

The first modern study of Hartley Coleridge, showing that he deserves our attention not as the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but as a literary presence in his own right.

Andrew Keanie is Lecturer at the University of Ulster.

“Andrew Keanie’s Hartley Coleridge: A Reassessment of His Life and Work is a timely study of a largely forgotten poet.”–Doomsday: Journal of the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society“Andrew Keanie’s book is a significant achievement in scholarship, and a real delight to read: erudite and incisive, judicious and forthright, it is written with finely perceptive sympathy, and a committed conviction of Hartley’s originality. Hartley emerges, therefore, as a striking individualist: ‘the first flaneur’ (167), anticipating the ‘morbid psychology’ of Baudelairean disillusion (170); a writer as deliberately and disconcertingly idiosyncratic as the Marcel Proust who ‘did not belong to the same world’ as the publishers who rejected Du Cote de Chez Swann; and who, like Hartley, ‘wrote like nobody else’.[1] Keanie regrets that Hartley ‘has never been anywhere near inclusion in the English Romantic canon’; and that his ‘work has not been revisited with the same sense of excitement and humility’ as that of other ‘minor’ Romantics (110). This book, however, should be a significant influence in redressing the balance in Hartley’s favour, and will surely stimulate further research. In particular, modern scholarly editions of Hartley’s poetry and prose are now required if we are to appreciate his work as fully as it deserves.[2] Keanie’s splendid reassessment will undoubtedly prove indispensable for those who follow: a truly pioneering and inspirational study.”–Robin Schofield, The Coleridge Bulletin                      

 

Perspective: the Hereditary Longing * His Childhood * His Ripening Childhood * Designated Misfit * His Ripening Achievement 8 King of Ejuxria